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Reach back under stress for handcuffs and instead pull the service weapon and without thinking when you pull the weapon you also pull the trigger. Muscle memory and associative conditioning MAY have been at fault here.

Terrible.

I have had moderate training with sightless handcuffing and no matter what, I believe it's impossible to confuse a pistol with handcuffs. Now if the pistol was confused with a taser then I could see it being an idiotic mistake. But handcuffs in no way feel like a gun, especially to someone who handles the two regularly.

Sen. Clare McCaskill (D-MO) said on Wednesday that Joe Biden "has a tendency to talk forever and sometimes say things that are kind of stupid." She seemed to regret her own words, saying, "I was probably having a Joe Biden moment myself."

At best, the way things look is that you can say it's accidental. That's, IMO, absolute best case scenario. If it was accidental, the officer needs to be brought up on manslaughter charges and never again allowed to work in the field of law enforcement. Worst case is that it's purposeful, though I can't imagine how an officer would purposefully execute a restrained suspect. I'm more inclined to believe it was accidental. Though if purposeful, the officer needs to be brought up on murder charges. I think that the chance that it was justifiable is almost zero.

You know the time is right to take control, we gotta take offense against the status quo

Originally Posted by A. de Tocqueville

"I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it."

Protests over BART shooting turn violent

A protest over the fatal shooting by a BART police officer of an unarmed man mushroomed into a violent confrontation tonight, as a faction of protesters smashed a police car and storefronts, set several cars on fire and blocked streets in downtown Oakland.

Protesters smashed the storefronts of McDonald's as well as stores called Creative African Braids and Oakland Yoon's Pharmacy. Cars along 14th Street were smashed, and some were set ablaze.

[...]

Oakland Police Officer Michael Cardoza parked his car across the intersection of Eighth and Madison streets, to prevent traffic from flowing toward Broadway and into the protest. But he told The Chronicle that a group of 30 to 40 protesters quickly surrounded his car and started smashing it with bottles and rocks.

Cardoza jumped out of the car and said some protesters tried to set the car on fire, while others jumped on top of the hood - incidents repeatedly shown on television. Cardoza said the protesters "were trying to entice us into doing something."

There are a few more personal accounts inside. A lot of it has the ring of random violence and destruction that can only be described as a riot